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You
are here: Story Makes Sense of Story:
The Power of Oral Narrative in Language Arts Classrooms
by Mary M. Juzwik and Michael Sherry
"In gym, when he followed me around, it was not fun," says Cathy. In three quick strokes, she tells a story. Should it be cause for alarm that this student is not directly talking about the text her seventh grade literature class is reading? Certainly not, for Cathy is responding to Virginia Wolff's Make Lemonade (1994) through the indirect and powerful pathway of story. One of the characters in the novel is fired from her job after resisting her boss's advances, and Cathy has responded with her own experience, contributing her own thread to the fabric of literary conversation in her classroom. With two temporal clauses and an evaluation, she has created an oral narrative, a particular kind of story, and a particular kind of response in language arts classrooms. In fact, oral narratives, told by teachers and students, depend on the particular as a powerful means of changing minds and interpreting literature. Though Cathy has not condemned sexual harassment, or made and supported an assertion about the text of Make Lemonade, her story, like other classroom narratives, weaves metaphor and identity into the textual interpretation of her language arts classroom.
Cathy's teacher, fifteen-year veteran, Susan Gomez, is an even more experienced storyteller; like Cathy's, her narratives often focus on her own experience, knitting past moments together with an evaluation into a rich tapestry of details and voices. In short, they afford the universal power of the specific to make listeners identify, reflect on, reframe, and evaluate personal experience. Through oral narrative, participants in this classroom –including the students and Ms. Gomez – become actively involved in weaving a web of connections between literature and their lives. As her class explores why one of the characters in Make Lemonade does not remember her father, Ms. Gomez relates her earliest memory:
1. I know what my earliest memory i:s.
2. I was f:our.
3. I had to have been four
4. because my little sister had just been bo:rn (.)
5. yeah,
6. so it was sixty-six.
7. And we were still living in the house on Lasalle street,
8. and my uncle had bought us a swing set . . .
9. and my favorite thing wa—10. at the time, we had this hedge?
11. of bushes you know
12. that went rou— ((extending and sweeping both arms outward, in encircling motion)),
13. you know but they were TA:LL. ((standing up and holding hand under chin))
14. They were probably not that bi—
15. I probably could see over them NOW,
16. but when you're a KID like that.
17. and when we were little,
18. we couldn't leave the YARD,
19. we had to play in the yard,
20. it was totally fenced in,
21. and bushed in
22. all the way around?23. And so,
24. I was on the SWING, ((moving arm in swinging motion))
25. and I remember being able to look
26. over the HEDGE,
27. on the swing,
28. back and forth ((moving forearms out and into chest)),
29. I could see into the street,
30. and I thought it was so big,
31. like oh my god,
32. there's the whole WORLD
33. out there.
34. and I was only FOUR.To introduce this narrative, Ms. Gomez provides the details of specific characters, time period, and physical setting. Specificity of concrete and believable detail lends credibility to her narrative and involves her audience of students and fellow literary interpreters. Pinpointing the moment of her tale between a recent event (her sister's birth), and a continuous one (living in the house on LaSalle Street), she organizes the story almost as if she were making sense of the events through the telling, and invites students, through this narrator's voice, to do the same.
However another voice – beyond that of the narrator – begins to emerge in the next section of her narrative. Ms. Gomez begins to inhabit the character of her four-year-old self – enacting or "animating" participation within that childhood world. In lines 8-9, "and my uncle had bought us a swing set . . . / and my favorite thing wa—," Ms. Gomez uses the shy, soprano voice of a four-year-old, emphasizing the word "swing" to convey childlike pleasure. In the lines that follow, this child's voice begins to take precedence. Rapid, broken threads of speech suggest Ms. Gomez's movement between the two roles as the narrative commentary interrupts the experience of the child Susan, and vice versa. Finally, the struggling presence of these two roles are suggested through a series of juxtapositions between now (15) and then (10); between being a kid (16-17) and "I" an adult (15); and between the hedges being TA:LL (13) and "not that bi[g]" (l4).
In this narrative, Susan Gomez is both a child and an adult, and the interlacing of these roles models for students the multiplicity of their own voices. As in Cathy's narrative, there is the voice of the experience and the voice that evaluates and makes sense of that experience, and thus has power over it. Thus oral narrative allows (but does not force) listeners to identify with the universality of a specific experience, and it models the shaping of one's own identity through story.
While it is obvious that stories are present in language arts classrooms in the form of print textbooks and trade books, oral narratives of personal experience in classrooms too often go under the radar in discussions about teaching. Yet oral narratives, whether of the minimal kind told by Cathy or the more fully-elaborated sort told by Ms. Gomez, actually function as a powerful resource in language arts classrooms. They are opportunities for students and teacher to entertain one another, to create and maintain "narrative spells" in classroom conversation, where both audience and speaker become lost in the verbal artfulness of the story and its telling. In this way, storytelling and listening to story may mirror the very pleasurable experience that most teachers want students to come to savor when reading literature itself.
However, everyone in Cathy's classroom is not simply "off-task," goading one another to move tantalizingly off subject (cf. Florio-Ruane, 2001); rather, this form of discourse may support a number of pedagogical goals when embedded in the rich, responsive space of conversational literary interpretation (Nystrand, 1997; Ochs & Capps, 2001). Consider the following narrative told by Ms. Gomez in the context of a debate over the ethnicity of the characters in Make Lemonade:
1. At ONE time,
2. on your driver's licence
3. ((State name)) HAD ONLY BLACK or WHITE,
4. that's what you had to [choose from]--
5. ….
6. And they wouldn't LET me
7. choose black,
8. 'cause I thought,
9. well,
10. I'm DARKer,
11. I'm not really,
12. I'm not WHITE,
13. if I'm anything
14. I'm closer to being BLACK
15. than I am to being WHITE.
16. But they wouldn't LET me
17. put that down,
18. and I was really angry
19. 'cause I thought,
20. well,
21. if those are the only choices you GIVE me . . .
22. shouldn't I be able to choose?Here Ms. Gomez's Mexican American identity and experience are brought into the forum through a narrative telling. Again, this narrative relates a personal experience with which the diverse students of her class may identify, and concerns the shaping of one's identity. It also highlights a moral dilemma of that identity-shaping, and perhaps of narrative in general: what to do when one is denied the words to describe oneself? And yet, although Ms. Gomez was forced to make a limited choice back then, she can now tell a tale of indignation which argues for the right to choose. This argument, despite its intensity, is not polemical, but once again, personal, and metaphorical: the "I"'s final question can become the question of those who identify. And there is a metaphor, too, in the re-telling of this story: through the power of narrative, she has transformed an experience of frustration into a tool.
Because of their evaluative function, oral narratives can serve as a means for moral stance-taking and, potentially, for moral development in classrooms. Few other spaces and forms of discourse in public schooling, particularly in middle and high schools, afford explorations of the consequences of particular actions and their impact on unfolding and future lives. This exploration of a variety of "what if?" scenarios has long been recognized as an affordance of literary and poetic writing (Aristotle, 1992; Coles, 1989). However, in classroom conversations about literature, oral narratives provide a special way of encouraging such responses to literature to germinate, develop, and expand into fully-developed narratives in which moral stances are articulated, explored, and sometimes challenged.
Thus narratives serve a generative function in classrooms: in the words of Nystrand, they "open dialogue." As hinted in Nystrand et al's (2003) analysis of how discussions emerge over time in classroom talk (tracking questions in particular), Susan Gomez's teaching offers empirical evidence that narratives spark new narratives and often lead to (or emerge from) dialogic discussions about literature. Consider, for example, the following rather lengthy narrative sequence, which emerged in response to a scenario in the book where one of the characters is being taken advantage of by her boss.
Ms. Gomez: WELL, it's unfortunate, you know, as you get older, too, there are probably going to be things that come up where people are going to try to take advantage of you. SomeTIMES in a physical way. And will you be prePARED for it?
1. You know,
2. I-MY experience has been different
3. growing up
4. because I'm Mexican.
5. And I SEE the world through Mexican eyes.
6. And I was TAUGHT that
7. not everybody LIKES Mexican kids.8. And so
9. I grew up being on GUARD
10. around adults,
11. around people.
12. I had to watch . . .
13. out for that,
14. 'cause if I let my guard down . . .
15. and I've done that,
16. where I didn't think about it
17. and I wasn't paying attention,
18. and somebody treated me unfairly,
19. and then
20. it REALLy makes me-
21. freaks me OUT
22. and it makes me unCOMfortable,
23. when somebody's being prejudiced or something?
24. And I'm not ready for it.
25. I'd rather,
26. I was explaining this the other day,
27. I'd rather go into the situation
28. exPECTing to be treated unfairly
29. than go into the situation n-
30. NOT expecting it,
31. thinking,
32. oh these are nice people,
33. they're gonna be nice to me,
34. because when I'm not-
35. when I don't have my GUARD up . . .
36. I'm not prepared to answer back to somebody.
37. You know what I mean-
38. what I'm saying?39. Like let me give you an example,
40. I was in the store the other day,
41. and the CLERK was ignoring me.
42. She was waiting on the person over here,
43. and then she went to wait on the person over HERE,
44. and after she did this TW ICE . . .
45. and I had been there first,
46. I spoke up.
47. And I said,
48. excuse me,
49. am I inVISible?Alice: You SAID that?
Ms. Gomez:
50. Ye s . . .
51. and she looked at me,
52. she said,
53. oh, I'm sorry.
54. I said,
55. I was waiting, I was here first.
56. And she wasn't going to acknowledge me until I spoke up.
57. And it made me-
58. it reminded me aGAIN
59. that there are people OUT there,
60. that are going to try to take advantage of me,
61. and be [mean to me, be disrespectful to me.]Alice: [That's like what happened to us, too]
Ms. Gomez: What?
Alice:
1. My dad . . .
2. we were there
3. in the store,
4. it was in St. (?)
5. and we were (?) ordering lunch,
6. and we were there,
7. I was there be fore . . .
8. when my family was coming off the boat
9. that we just got off of,
10. and I-I was waiting,
11. I was gonna order some ice cream or something?Ms. Gomez: Mhm.
Alice:
12. And th-they all come in,
13. and I-I'm just like,
14. okay,
15. w-we can order now,
16. and I say,
17. okay,
18. because she was already asking me if I was ready?Ms. Gomez: Mhm.
Alice:
19. And then
20. this lady said,
21. EXCUSE ME! I WAS FIRST!
22. Because I was just a kid?
23. You know?
24. I hate it when people do that!Ms. Gomez: Right.
Alice: Especially people at stores. [they're just like, um, you're just a kid]
Ms. Gomez: [YES! CLERKS!] Well that's what I was hoping some of you were going to share, examples like in the store, I know clerks can do that, they'll ignore a little kid.
1. I would be . . .
2. next to a little kid,
3. and the clerk would come
4. and ask me for something,
5. and I would say,
6. well this person got here FIRST,
7. they've got their MONEY out,
8. they're ready to [ORder.]Hector: HUH! ((Puts head down, waves arm and hand from elbow up above head))
Ms. Gomez:
9. I mean
10. just ['cause they're SHORT
11. doesn't mean you should] take advantage of them.Lelina:
1. [Yeah,
2. I'll go,
3. I'll go out]—Ms. Gomez: [UM—]
Lelina:
4. [Yeah I,]
5. I would SPEAK up,
6. I'd be like I was here first
7. I'm ready to order.This rich example shows how narrative can be braided together with narrative to form a rich fabric of response to literary characters and scenarios. Note too that narrative functions not only as a tool for moral exploration in response to the literature, but also as a means for teacher and students to respond to one another in the space of the classroom. Furthermore, culture, ethnicity, and, indeed, race – all complex aspects of identity – move into the classroom forum through the form of narrative. It is not enough that the teacher is herself a woman of color to make a difference in literary learning and instruction. Rather, through narrative tellings, she mobilizes and foregrounds the complex layers of her identity, putting it on display for her own critical reflection and commentary and for student response. Students show they have identified with her story of self through stories (real, in the case of Alice, and hypothetical, in the case of Lelina) of their own. Through responding to one another, they also respond to the literary situation of "being taken advantage of," for a variety of reasons.
Further, we gain a glimpse here of the teacherly intentions behind these narrative sequences when Ms. Gomez observes, "YES! CLERKS! Well that's what I was hoping some of you were going to share, examples like in the store, I know clerks can do that, they'll ignore a little kid." A little later in the conversation, she shares a story in which a little child was ignored by a clerk because he was little, parallel to the way she had been ignored by the clerk because she was "invisible" as a Mexican American woman. That this pattern plays out across time is made clear by the overall occurrences of narrative discourse: while Ms. Gomez told 51 stories throughout the course of the class reading Make Lemonade, student narratives were heard astonishingly often as well: 84 times during the unit. Ms. Gomez's statement of what she hoped students would share, coupled with a "bigger picture" of narrative tellings throughout the unit clearly indicate Ms. Gomez's enactment of the belief that sharing and shaping lives through oral narrative is an important aspect of reading literature in a language arts classroom, even at the middle school level.
These narratives, and the lessons they teach, suggest that there is more than one way to make meaning of a literary text in language arts classrooms. In most English classrooms, the prevailing language form is to ask students (if they speak at all) to report what they already know and to test whether or not they have gotten it right. The example par excellence is the IRE sequence, in which the teacher Initiates a question, the students Responds to the question, and the teacher Evaluates whether or not the student has gotten the right answer (e.g., Cazden, 2001). In some classes, however, students make sense of a text through analytical talk and essays: that is, they use the language of concept to make sense of a story. But the responsive conversations in which Cathy, Ms. Gomez, Lelina, and Alice participate offer a third possibility. Their storytelling practices reveal that, not only does oral narrative connect the text to the lives of its readers, but it provides a means for making sense of literature through the language of description and metaphor. Story can make sense of story. This is not to say that students should only tell stories about what they read. Rather than necessarily limiting the scope of interpretation, oral narrative may open the door to identification, to multiple perspectives, to moral stance-taking, to further narratives and dialogic discussion, and possibly also to the shaping of personal identity within a reading collective.
References
Aristotle. (1992). Poetics. In R. McKeon (Ed.), Introduction to Aristotle (pp. 659-712). New York: Modern Library.
Cazden, C. (2001). The language of teaching and learning. 2nd ed. New Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Florio-Ruane, S. (2001). Teacher Education and the Cultural Imagination: Autobiography, Conversation, and Narrative. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Juzwik, M. M. & Sherry, M. Narrative performance and conversations about literature: A new possibility for classroom drama. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Labov, W. (1972). The transformation of experience in narrative syntax. In Language in the inner city (pp. 354-396). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Nystrand, M., A. Gamoran, R. Kachur, C. Prendergast. (1997). Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.
Nystrand, M., Wu, L. L., Gamoran, A., Zeiser, S., & Long, D. A. (2003). Questions in time: Investigating the structure and dynamics of unfolding classroom discourse. Discourse processes 35 (2), 135-198.
Ochs, E. & L. Capps (2001). Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wolff, Virginia Euwer (1994). Make Lemonade. New York: Scholastic Paperbacks.
Mary M. Juzwik is Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy at Michigan State University, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in writing, discourse, rhetoric, and literacy education.
Web site URL: http://www.msu.edu/~mmjuzwik/
Email: mmjuzwik@msu.edu
Michael Sherry is a doctoral student at Michigan State University interested in drama and improvisational theater as a metaphor for teaching. Email: sherrymi@msu.edu
Please address all correspondence to:
Dr. Mary M. Juzwik
Email: mmjuzwik@msu.edu
308 Erickson Hall
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824
©March 2005 New Horizons for Learning
http://www.newhorizons.org
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